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Dumpling-free Hong Kong | page 1, 2, 3
Right, my story is about Hong Kong. It goes without saying that Chinese food is hugely popular here, since there's no better food anywhere on earth (with the possible exception of a certain barbecue place in Port Arthur, Texas, but never mind). However, Hong Kongers aren't only finicky, they're cosmopolitan. If you go to a Spanish or an Italian restaurant and if the place is crowded, all the faces there may well be Chinese. So I decided to take a dumpling-free tour of Hong Kong, to try as many different cuisines as I could. It was only a four-day trip, so I didn't get around to trying out any of the Russian, Scandinavian or British restaurants -- but then, I never bother with them at home in New York, either. My Indonesian buddy Rendy, who had never been to Hong Kong, came along for the ride. We stayed at the Harbour Plaza, a huge new hotel in Hung Hom, Kowloon. It's a bit off the beaten track, but a nearby ferry offers regular service to Hong Kong Central, and the rooftop pool commands spectacular views. It's also a bit goofy: When I arrived, the hotel had been transformed into a Caribbean theme park. A Jamaican steel drum band was playing in the lobby, next to a pile of sand with a dinghy perched atop, arrayed with caged parrots. The Chinese man at the reception desk, who was wearing a tropical-print shirt and a straw hat, informed me that the chain is opening a new property in Grand Cayman. It was the first theme experience in a trip that would prove to have a theme theme. My priority was steak. A friend had told me that the signature restaurant at the Harbour Plaza, the Harbour Grill, had the best steaks in Hong Kong, so I made a reservation for dinner there as soon as we got to the room. The Harbour Grill, like most haute-cuisine restaurants in Asia, is posh to a degree that seems a bit quaint from a Western perspective: It's furnished in fake French antiques, with lavish displays of fake flowers, dramatic spotlights and tuxedoed waiters who murmur. But there it was on the menu -- "The Best Beef in Town." The Harbour Plaza has an exclusive with Stock Yards Packing Co. of Chicago, which, the menu informed me, "has been supplying America's most exclusive steak houses with steak for over 100 years. Their magnificent meat cuts are individually weighed, hand-trimmed and inspected before shipment. It is this careful attention to quality that makes their steaks so juicy and tender." Everything they said was true. My rib-eye steak was juicy and tender, and it could have been a textbook illustration of medium rare (even at some good restaurants in the States, I find, they think you really mean "medium" but are afraid of being uncool). It was served with a perfect béarnaise sauce, french fries, slightly underdone garden vegetables and Frank Sinatra's greatest hits. It was everything a steak dinner should be, but I confess I was a bit disappointed. I eat steak rarely, but when I do, I find it's like taking a secret puff on a cigarette when you're quitting -- the event never measures up to the expectation. It's only a steak. We eat fish every day in Bali, and I had been thinking about that steak for weeks before the trip, but nonetheless I found myself eyeing Rendy's Dover sole enviously.
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